Plot Summary

 Holes is a fantasy book by Louis Sachar. Fantasy is defined by Literature and the Child as “imaginative literature distinguished by characters, places, or events that could not happen in the real world” (Galda 16). This book is fantasy because it contains elements that do not exist in real life, such as venomous yellow spotted lizards. It also contains a real curse, something considered unreal by the majority of the population.

                Holes is a non-linear story told by an omniscient narrator about characters living in several different time periods. It centers on the character Stanley Yelnats IV, an overweight boy with bad luck. Stanley’s rotten luck leads to his arrest after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, for something that he did not do.  The judge then sends him to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile correctional facility for boys. Every day, the campers are forced to dig holes in the desert that are 5 feet deep and 5 feet diameter. They are told that digging holes builds character, but Stanley finds out the real reason that they are digging: to find the treasure of Kissin’ Kate Barlow, the warden of the camp.  Stanley finds a lipstick tube while digging a whole, immediately after finding the lipstick he is persuaded into giving the tube to one of the other boys because he is the “new kid” at camp and everyone knows if you find a treasure you are rewarded by getting a day off.  Once the warden hears the news of the lipstick tube finding, she orders a full search on the area, except there is one problem.  The whole they claimed to have found the lipstick tube in was the wrong whole.

                The author then takes the reader back in time to show why Stanley and the men in his family are so unlucky, using the narrative of his great-great-grandfather, Elya Yelnats. The book also tells the tale of how Kate Barlow became an outlaw. Then it goes back to Stanley’s story, as he begins to befriend Zero, a boy in his work group who is seen as a nobody due the fact that he does not speak to anybody at the camp. He teaches Zero to read, and Zero digs part of his hole for him every day. One day, Zero runs away from camp into the desert. After a week Stanley runs away too, and finds Zero shading himself under an overturned boat, keeping alive by drinking “sploosh”, something out of a jar that was buried under the boat back when Green Lake was still a lake.

                Zero and Stanley start walking toward a mountain shaped like a giant thumb, hoping to find water on it. Zero gets sick, so Stanley carries him up the mountain, finding water and onions at the top. After resting and revitalizing for about a week and a half, the boys walk back to camp. They begin to look in the hole where Stanley found the lipstick tube for Kissin’ Kate’s treasure, then walk with it back to civilization. They find the treasure chest, but are caught by the warden, who realizes that the hole they are standing in is full of venomous yellow spotted lizards. Stanley’s lawyer comes to get Stanley, who has been declared innocent and is free to go. Stanley and Zero climb out of the hole without being bitten and Stanley takes the treasure home with him, as the suitcase containing it has his name inscribed on it.

            However it is also important to take a look at this book in another light when looking at the characters and the physical environment as a whole. In the book Holes the characters' physical environment acts as a metaphor for their emotional states. Camp Green Lake is dry, hard, and hot. It is a physically unpleasant place to be and the people who live there lead unpleasant lives. The counselors are cruel and the boys are tough and often unfriendly. The mountain that Stanley and his great-grandfather call God's thumb, however, is lush and green. While Stanley is there he is free of outside threats and he is very happy. It shows another way to look at characterization as does the way you look at the names of the characters.

                     You can incorporate names into the element of the story in several ways. They way that things or people are named is very important.  For instance, the name Kissin' Kate Barlow, brings to mind a dangerous outlaw while the name Miss Katherine suggests a mild mannered schoolteacher. The two names (and the two personalities) belong to the same person but the way in which she is perceived depends very heavily on what name she is given. Similarly, the nicknames that the boys give themselves at Camp Green Lake represent a separation of their life at home from their life at the camp. Stanley is known as a mild-mannered boy who is easily picked on at home but his name at camp, Caveman, suggests a fierce and strong boy who might be able to scare others. While Stanley does, in fact, become stronger and at points a little bit meaner while at Camp Green Lake, overall he keeps his genial personality from home. The way the names are given can have an effect on the way that the personalities are perceived and the way you perceive the characters throughout the story.

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Textual Elements

             Setting drives the story of the book. It starts out with Stanley’s story in the present. Then it jumps back to the past, when Stanley’s great-great-grandfather was only fifteen (Sachar 28). The book goes between the two settings for a chapter, and then focuses back on the present. On page 101, it skips back to the time when Green Lake was a town, when Kate Barlow were alive (101). For the rest of part one, the setting switches from the present to the past and back. Despite the switches in time period, almost the whole book takes place at Green Lake, TX. There are slight deviations from this setting, as Elya’s story starts out in Latvia (Sachar 28). Stanley’s starts somewhere about a nine hour drive from Camp Green Lake, although Stanley’s hometown is never mentioned in the book (12). This gives the reader the idea that this story could have started out almost anywhere in the United States.

                The plot of Holes is very interesting because it contains a lot of connections between what happened in the past and what occurs in the present.  As you are reading you don’t see it right away, it isn’t until the end of the book that you begin to see how the past and present and everyone in the book is tied together and connected. In the past, when Green Lake was a town, a man developed an onion juice that kept yellow spotted lizards away from the drinker (Sachar 222). When Stanley and Zero are stuck in the hole with all the lizards, they do not get bitten (209). The book does not explicitly say why, but the chapter about the onion man comes shortly after and the reader already knows that Stanley and Zero ate a ton of onions right before they got into the hole. The reader can easily infer that the onions kept Stanley and Zero from being bitten. Through Stanley and Zero’s experience, they are linked to the past.  

                Sam had a boat and a donkey named Mary Lou (Sachar 107). When Stanley runs away and finds Zero in the desert, Zero is hiding from the sun under an overturned boat with the words Mary Lou inscribed in the side (153). Again, Sachar never explicitly states that the boat is Sam’s, but the reader has enough context clues to figure it out.  Although many things are not explicitly said, without the narrative about Sam, the reader would not understand the overall plot of the book and the meaning behind many events.

                Holes has many themes and the most important one is fate. The men in Stanley’s family blamed their bad luck on Stanley’s no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather (Sachar 7). His great-great-grandfather was given a pig by a gypsy named Madame Zeroni and was warned that if he failed to carry the gypsy up the mountain in return, “he and his descendents would be doomed for all of eternity” (Sachar 31). In the book, the curse seems to be true. Stanley’s great-great-grandfather’s barn was struck by lightning and burned down three times (38). His great-grandfather was robbed by Kissin’ Kate Barlow (Sachar 9). Stanley’s father is an inventor who has perseverance, but none of his experiments work (Sachar 8). Stanley definitely has bad luck, as he is hit in the head by a pair of sneakers and gets arrested because of it (Sachar 24).  Another theme in the book is that everything happens for a reason.  Although Stanley did appear to have bad luck, it was that bad luck that in turn, emensily helped his family out.  If Stanley had never been sentenced to the camp, he would have never discovered the treasure that was buried and belonged to his family.  His family was not well off and the treasure provided them with enough money to live a more comfortable lifestyle as well as help launch his dads foot-odor perfume.  Stanley also would have never met Zero, a boy who couldn’t leave and was basically an orphan.  Zero also benefited from Stanley because Stanley was able to used the money to help Zero locate his mother.

          Another theme to mention is the benefits of forming solid friendships, which is clearly shown, throughout holes. Stanley and Zero's friendship lead to their mutual survival and wealth. Even though he is still facing adversity, once Stanley is secure in Zero's friendship he feels happier than he has ever felt in his life. False friends who are only friendly when they are getting something they want, like X-Ray, are shown to be dangerous. A negative example of this would be when X-Ray stops getting benefits out of his friendship with Stanley, he becomes hostile towards him.   

                Sachar never explicitly states whether Stanley’s luck was based on the curse, but it is heavily implied.Stanley’s family’s luck turned around the day that he carried Zero up the mountain. In the book it says, “Stanley’s father invented his cure for foot odor the day after the great-great-grandson of Elya Yelnats carried the great-great-great-grandson of Madame Zeroni [Zero] up the mountain” (Sachar 227). About a week afterwards, Stanley feels really happy and believes that the shoes hitting him on the head was destiny (185). Shortly after, Stanley finds a suitcase containing Kissin’ Kate’s treasure, which has his name on it (Sachar 214). Stanley’s luck clearly changes for the better after he carries Zero up the mountain. The reader is left wondering whether it could all be a coincidence or whether the fate of the Yelnats family really was controlled by a curse. 

Analysis and Critique

     The author’s style is quite unique. Sachar uses very short sentences. Some sentences are only a word long. On page 4, there are two sentences of that type, “Usually.” and  “Always” (4). His sentences also get straight to the point. The first sentence, for example, is simply “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake” (3). It does not tell why there is no lake there, or what Camp Green Lake was. If the reader reads on, they will find out more details, but usually only one idea is presented per sentence.  Because this book is geared toward younger readers, I think the short and simple sentences allow for the reader to easily follow along and become captivated in the book because they are not overwhelmed by lengthy paragraphs and overly detailed descriptions.

                Some of the paragraphs in Holes are long, but some of them are very short. The short paragraphs usually catch the reader’s attention. For example, on one page the author writes a long paragraph about something embarrassing that happened in Stanley’s class, then the next paragraph is just one sentence, “Stanley was arrested later that day” (Sachar 7). This sentence draws the reader’s attention and surprises them, because it is not the usual paragraph length that he/she would expect, nor is it the content they would expect right after a paragraph about school.  This sets up the flow of the book, because this book is targeted toward younger readers, writing lengthy and detailed paragraphs would not catch the interest of many children.  However, it is important for the author to not use to few words because they would then cut down their intended audience.  Combining short and sweet sentences with more detailed paragraphs allows the author to captivate the reader but not overwhelm them with detail.

                Another thing the author used to help initiate the flow of the book was cutting the length of the chapters. For example, chapter two is less than half a page long and all of the paragraphs on the page are only one sentence long (Sachar 5).  Because the chapters are so short, the reader can get through them quickly. This helps the story clip along faster and helps maintain the attention of the reader because he/she is not continuously reading one chapter for a long time.

                The author’s style is also to give the reader information implicitly. Above, I have already mentioned some examples of this. The reason that Stanley and Zero did not get bitten by yellow spotted lizards, the fact that the boat they stayed under was Sam’s, and whether or not Stanley was cursed are all facts given to the reader by the author implicitly. Another interesting implicit fact was that the “sploosh” that Zero ate under the boat was really canned peaches made by Kate Barlow before she became an outlaw. The author never tells the reader this, but he emphasizes the fact that Kate was good at making canned peaches (101). He also gives a motive for the peaches being under Sam’s boat: Sam was given peaches for doing tasks around Kate’s schoolhouse (109). One sentence that really solidifies the fact that sploosh is canned peaches is “He [Stanley] thought it might have been some kind of fruit at some time, perhaps peaches” (156). Although Sachar never writes “Stanley and Zero drank the canned peaches that Kate Barlow had made years ago” he makes it clear implicitly.  This helps the reader develop skills of inferring what is happening through textual cues.  Things are not always blatantly said and by not giving the answer the reader is forced to infer and notice detail that is hidden “between the lines”.  Another benefit from this is that the reader is forced to recall information from earlier in the book.  If he/she is not paying close enough attention, when the subtle hints are thrown in there, they will have a hard time making connections between characters and events taking place in the book.  This helped the reader with comprehension skills.  Comprehension is an important skill for children to develop and I think by Louis Sachar allowing the reader to make their own connections allows for this book to be used as a good example for reading comprehension.

                One of the hidden messages of the book is that juvenile delinquents are not always horrible, dangerous people. Stanley is a prime example, as he was found guilty of a crime that he did not commit (Sachar 24). Zero was guilty of stealing, but he only stole because he was homeless and had no other way of surviving (181-182). Even the rest of the Group D boys, the ones who actually had committed crimes, had redeeming qualities. They stuck together, kind of like a family. Their nicknames for each other showed their bond. “He [Stanley] was glad they called him Caveman. It meant they accepted him as a member of the group” (54). Stanley knew that once he was part of their group, they would help him out. In fact, the boys stood beside him when a member of a foreign group tried to make trouble (44). The boys in group D still care about family members in the outside world. One of the boys tells Stanley to talk to his mom for him and tell her that he is sorry (219). This shows that the boy knows that he hurt people by doing something wrong and still cares about someone besides himself. These are qualities that society does not often link to juvenile delinquents.  This message is important for children to grasp onto because even if somebody does something wrong, it is important to remember that they too, are human, just like everybody else, and they have personal qualities that should not be forgotten, they just may need extra help to overcome their pool decisions.

                 Through Holes, the author seems to be saying that the present builds on the past and that knowing about the past is important. It goes back to that reoccuring quote "If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs, "The bark on the tree was just a little bit softer." While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely, He cries to the moo-oo-oon, "If only, if only." the song that Madame Zeroni taught Elya Yelnats and that was subsequently passed down through generations until it reached Stanley and Zero. The lyrics of the song show that even wolves and birds wish that life was easier. It is a song to be sung by the Yelnats and Zeroni families, two families that have had bad luck and hard lives. It leads back to the example when Stanley and Zero are stranded in the desert, they climb to the top of a mountain that looks like God’s thumb to find water (170). This is the same mountain that his great-grandfather survived on while he was stranded in the desert (142). If Stanley had not known the story about his great-grandfather finding refuge on God’s thumb, he would not have been able to find refuge in the desert. Knowing about the past allowed him to survive in dire circumstances.  Through Stanley we also see that sometimes life throws you curve balls, and it is important to remember that even when things seem to be at their worst, through hard work and determination, you can overcome the negative and find the positive on the other side of the story.

     Holes can be beneficiary to children of many ages and can open for a broad range of teaching material. If one is interested There are Holes Lesson Plans that consists of approx. 122 pages of daily lessons and classroom quizzes on Holes by Louis Sachar. To browse the lesson plans: visit http://www.bookrags.com/lessonplan/holes/. Or another Great site to visit is http://litplans.com/authors/Louis_Sachar.html 

Citation

Galda, Lee, Bernice Cullinan and Lawrence Sipe. Literature and the Child. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006.

Sachar, Louis. Holes. New York: Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1998.